If you are using Internet Explorer 10
(or later), you might find some of the links I have used won't work properly
unless you switch to 'Compatibility View' (in the Tools Menu); for IE11 select
'Compatibility View Settings' and then add this site (anti-dialectics.co.uk). I have as yet no idea how
Microsoft's new browser,
Edge, will handle these links.

~~~~~~oOo~~~~~~

As is the case with all my
work, nothing here should be read as an attack
either on Historical Materialism [HM] -- a scientific theory I fully accept --, or,
indeed,
on revolutionary socialism. I remain as committed to the self-emancipation of the
working class and the dictatorship of the proletariat as I was when I first became a revolutionary
nearly thirty years ago.

The
difference between
Dialectical Materialism [DM] and HM, as I see it, is explained
here.

~~~~~~oOo~~~~~~

If your Firewall/Browser has a pop-up blocker, you will need to press the
"Ctrl" key at the same time or these links here won't work,
anyway!

Finally, I have adjusted the
font size used at this site to ensure that even those with impaired
vision can read what I have to say. However, if the text is still either too
big or too small for you, please adjust your browser settings!

This is the (slightly edited) text of a
letter a supporter of this site sent to the editors of
Socialist Review. They chose not to publish
it.

Dear
Comrades,

Phil
Webster's otherwise excellent review of Biology Under The Influence (SR,
July/August 2008) by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins was seriously
marred by his failure to evaluate critically the 'dialectical' approach these
two authors have adopted toward their subject matter. As is easy to show, this
theory enjoys little support either from argument or evidence, so little in fact
that had one of their PhD students produced anything quite as amateurish in their
scientific studies, Levins and Lewontin would have asked them to leave the
course in the first week.

Phil
says:

Some Marxists are doubtful about the
usefulness of dialectics, especially when applied to the natural sciences. This
book ought to convince those doubters. The authors show the necessity of
applying a dialectical materialist method in science if we want to gain a full
understanding of the world. They argue for "a dialectical emphasis on wholeness,
connection and context, change, historicity, contradiction, irregularity,
asymmetry, and the multiplicity of levels of phenomena, as a refreshing
counterweight to the prevailing reductionism."

Not
so; it will convince not a single one of us. That is because this book repeats
all the same old errors, but with a few new ones thrown in for good
measure (perhaps to keep us sceptics amazed that comrades still believe such stuff).
[Many of these have been demolished here.]

Now,
Biology might or might not need to appeal to ideas of "wholeness, connection,
context, and change", but if it does, then dialectics is such a poor theory it
wouldn't make the bottom of the reserve
list of likely candidates. In terms of "wholeness and connection",
Mereology,
for example, beats dialectics into a cocked hat.

Moreover, with respect to "change", ordinary language also wins hands
down every time. That is because practically every verb, adverb and adjective attests to the fact
that in English alone we have
countless thousands of
words all capable of describing and thus explaining every conceivable form
of change, in almost limitless detail. So, we don't need the obscure language
invented by Hegel to fix something that wasn't broken.

Even
more revealing is the fact that if truth is tested in practice, then the last
150 years of the almost total failure of Dialectical Marxism has already refuted
dialectics -- all four Internationals have gone down the pan, the results of
1917 have been reversed, and Dialectical Marxism is deeply divided into hundreds, if
not thousands of warring sects, all with a different but nonetheless 'correct'
dialectical line. Not surprisingly the working class in their hundreds of
millions totally ignore us.

In
that case, it is high time we ditched this theory, which
history has already refuted, and
allowed Historical Materialism itself -- cleared of all that useless Hegelian
jargon -- to be developed scientifically.